Munjana (1990) – Archie Roach

Australian Aboriginal singer Archie Roach has appeared here before with his song about the homeless called Down City Streets. I have written about him also in conjunction with other Australian music – artists David Bridie and Paul Kelly. If there was any song by their lyrics alone which grab you ‘hook, line and sinker‘ then today’s featured track Munjana is it.
It all started for Archie when Paul Kelly invited him to open his concert early in 1989, where he performed Took the Children Away; a song telling the story of the Stolen Generations and his own experience of being forcibly removed from his family. His performance was met with stunned silence, followed by shattering applause.

Munjana is the story of Beverley Whyman, and her son Russell Thomas Moore, a Wema-Wema and Yorta-Yorta man from Matakupaat (Swan Hill, Victoria). Munjana means ‘trouble’ and was a nickname Beverly Whyman obtained while a child.

Times were hard in old Swan Hill
And her circumstances got harder still
The only thing this woman ever knew was pain
It seemed she’d never know sweet happiness again
Kicked around, treated bad
It’s not right for one so young to be so sad
A koori child should not have had this cross to bear
It makes me wonder if anybody really cares
Troubled woman is your name
Through no fault of yours it seems you always got the blame
And an old man’s voice calls from afar

Who will shed a tear for Munjana?

Fond memories of Moulamein
The only happy times her family had seen
Wishing that those happy times would never end
With Uncle John who at the time was their best friend
But this young girl just couldn’t win
She got in to trouble in Deniliquin
Had a lovely child way down in old Fitzroy
Then the Welfare came and took her baby boy
Baby Russell was his name
They took him from her arms and made her feel ashamed
Took him away to America

Just like Archie’s previous entry Down City Streets, Munjana is storytelling at its finest. If you want to get a sense of how it was like to be part of the Stolen Generation families, then this is the go-to-song at least based on what I’ve heard. The Stolen Generations are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their families and communities by the government. This was a race-based policy that lasted from 1910 to the 1970s and aimed to assimilate Indigenous children into the dominant culture.

I have presented two videos below. The first is the studio track recording and the second is Archie Roach explaining how the song Munjana came to being. When I learned that Archie had passed away 30 July 2022, I was a wreck. He was one of my biggest musical influencers in my young adulthood. His album Charcoal Lane is one of my favourite Australian albums.

I highly recommend this video when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the 13th of February 2008 in the Australian House of Representatives, apologized for the government programs which took children from Aboriginal families, the “stolen generations”.

Archie Roach said about today’s song Munjana:

One of the places in Fitzroy, Alexandra Parade..they took babies away from all sorts of mothers: black, white, it didn’t matter. If you were unmarried and a young woman sometimes you were sent to these places; these so called ‘sisters’ would take the babies away from their mothers. And their mothers never even saw them. And so that’s what happened to this young man. Ended up in America. Unfortunately ended up in prison in Florida for a pretty terrible crime. But that’s not so much what the song is about. It’s about Beverly (his mother)….
So she’s telling me this story and I couldn’t believe it….Beverly’s nickname was Manjana which means ‘trouble‘. So I thought about that…I sat down and these words kept coming to me..It’s a horrific story really about this young fella. I can’t condone what he ended up going to prison for. And I don’t try in this song. And I don’t condone what happened to him as a little fella. And that’s what this song is about: His mother Beverly Munjana ‘trouble’, so that’s how the song came to be. ‘Troubled Woman’.

You can see the ‘trouble’ and pain in Archie’s face as he’s recalling this. The impact such immoral and abhorrent policies / practices have had on a whole communities and races of people (even those seemingly unaffected by the policies directly) is so apparent in this story. It deserves repeating:

It makes me wonder if anybody really cares
Troubled woman is your name
Through no fault of yours it seems you always got the blame
And an old man’s voice calls from afar

Who will shed a tear for Munjana?

References:
1. Archie Roach – Wikipedia